Conveyor Belt of Goodness

In a growing business, it is critical that all elements of the firm tie together to achieve the company’s mission. Business leaders understand that it may be easier to let managers pursue their various areas of responsibility independently, but if you don’t take care to explicitly unite these aims, you run a risk of them starting to diverge.

A business of fiefdoms with divergent agendas undermines its own efforts through its political culture. To serve the optimal interests of the company, and to preserve everyone’s energy, goodwill, and money, it is important to clearly articulate and maintain a singular goal that everyone in the firm is focused on and dedicated to achieving.

At Crux, our single goal, our guiding beacon, if you will, is to delight clients. Everything we do is geared towards accomplishing that goal. Our particular path to delighting clients is by building and operating a data engineering platform and managed service that makes data delightful, but our team knows that fundamentally, even if we build and operate an awesome platform and service, if we fail to delight clients, then we have failed to fulfill our vision.

For a business to succeed, it’s not enough to articulate a grand vision. It’s equally important to integrate all of your company’s processes and systems into a coherent whole so that it is explicit how everyone’s efforts are contributing to the business and mission of your firm. At Crux, we call this integration of processes and systems our “Conveyor Belt of Goodness.” We imagine everything we do as contributing to a single ‘conveyor belt’ that runs through our business end-to-end.

From marketing and prospecting, to qualifying clients, to researching client needs, to building win-win relationships with data suppliers, to implementing data engineering projects and on-boarding datasets, to operating those ticking datasets in production, to helping clients access and use data, to billing, providing support, and ongoing account management, all the firm’s activities in every department are explicitly focused on contributing to that conveyor belt, and all our internal systems are integrated in appropriate ways to make that conveyor belt real.  

Every week, we have a meeting across all departments called our “CBOG Weekly” (Conveyor Belt Of Goodness, that is), where we run through all customer journeys from beginning to end of the ‘conveyor belt’ to ensure customer delight and sort out logjams. We also have a weekly all-hands meeting to view demos of our latest platform enhancements.

These meetings that involve everyone and link up activities across groups help everyone in the firm keep a holistic perspective on how all we do ties together. They also create shared accountability for customer delight, and a shared experience of the progress we are making.